Discussion

Crowd funding gives us reduced marketing costs. An author who raises around $10,000 (Kickstarter did $20 million in book projects in 2012) for a 200 page fiction book on Inkshares has an instant readership of 500 to 1000 backers. These people are passionate, and they talk.
Funds raised do cover more traditional marketing avenues, which we'll subsidize as needed.
Crowd funding also gives us a leg up with distribution through the demographic insight we derive from the process; we know what kind of people will be interested in buying the book.
We're definitely bullish on the model.

It seems like every industry is applying the crowdfunding model, from t-shirts (Teespring) to startups (Alphaworks).
Related: micro-publisher, FG Press (http://www.producthunt.co/posts/...) also launched earlier this week.

There are so many publishing options...if a standard publisher doesn't work, then I like Liber.io and Inkshares. Inkshares is great because it has editors...but the question I have is about marketing more than anything else?